Mod Edit (Emily): From now on, please use this thread to ask for recommendations or to ask simple questions about Chinese literature, history and strategy.

hi

i am looking for some good books on chinese history(preferably on the later han and three kingdoms) and chinese strategy.
so far i got the sun tzu the art of war, mastering the art of war by zhuge liang,and The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China.
could anyone recommend some other good titles please?

i am looking for some good books on chinese history(preferably on the later han and three kingdoms) and chinese strategy.so far i got the sun tzu the art of war, mastering the art of war by zhuge liang,and The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China.could anyone recommend some other good titles please?

Dr. Sawyer (likely the same one who translated your copy of the Seven Military Classics) also has a book entitled One Hundred Unorthodox Strategies. Compiled in the Ming Dynasty, it contains a sort of "best of" the military classics along with specific case studies, several of them featuring the Han and Three Kingdoms eras. One detail up front: the names are in the Wade-Giles romanization rather than in Pinyin, as in all of Sawyer's translations. The ISBN for the paperback edition is 0-8133-2860-8.

Sawyer also has a good translation of Sun Bin (or Sun Pin) entitled Military Methods of the Art of War. This is another Warring States work. The ISBN for the hardback edition (although a paperback one was also printed) is 1-5866-3608-1. Again, this one is in Wade-Giles.

Finally, I cannot recommend enough Knoblock and Riegel's translation of the Lushi chunqiu entitled The Annals of Lu Buwei. This is primarily a Qin Dynasty work that focuses on the Spring & Autumn period and is a wonderful source of knowledge for those who want to understand references to legendary and historical characters to whom the characters in Three Kingdoms make reference. The ISBN for the hardback edition from Stanford UP is 0-8047-3354-6. This one is Pinyin!

i am looking for some good books on chinese history(preferably on the later han and three kingdoms) and chinese strategy.so far i got the sun tzu the art of war, mastering the art of war by zhuge liang,and The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China.could anyone recommend some other good titles please?

Tianshan Zi mentioned a lot of good books, but there are also interesting Chinese books. There is The Book of Rites, called li ki in Pinyin, and Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. If you wish to gain a better understanding of the culture.

袁 "Since the dawn of time every one will die,
Let the history books note my death with loyalty at heart." --Wen Tianxiang

The following posts were posted in a thread that is now gone, but I thought I'd save them for the sake of discussion.

XellFone wrote:Which of the 3 novels is more related to San Guo Yan Yi?

Journey To The West: It's a make believe story, but there really was a monk that had to travel to india to get the books.

Water Margin: It's about war and fighting for land

Hong Lou Mong (Don't know the English Name) Is a fictional romance story about two people.

So I think Water Margin (Shui Hu Zhuan) is mostly related to San Guo Yan Yi. What do you think?

Seven at One Stroke wrote:Ugh. I can see nothing worthy that's likely to come out of this thread. Please, there are way too many Chinese novels besides the so-called "four great novels"; and IMO The Water Margin is far more inferior than the other three. The Water Margin is about a group of rebels coming together to fight against the ruling party, which is quite different from SGYY. But if there are only 3 choices, then it of course is the most similar.

Hou Long Meng is called either A Dream of the Red Mansion or The Story of the Stone in English, after the orginal name Shi Tou Ji. It's far from being a simple romance between two people, and the "romance" bit is only added on by someone other than the original author (Gao E).

Cai Yan wrote:There's some theories that say that Luo Guan Zhong co-authored Water Margin with Shi Nai An. Others say that Shi Nai An wrote the entire story himself. Nevertheless, we do find some bits of similarities between Water Margin and SGYY, since they were produced in almost the same era and referred to the same historical characters at times. It isn't coincidental that there are characters like Guan Sheng, descendant of Guan Yu and Lu Fang, the little Duke of Wen in Water Margin that were said to bear similar physical characteristics as their so-claimed ancestors from three kingdoms era.

"The person who knows how to laugh at himself will never cease to be amused." --Shirley Maclaine

The following question was asked in another thread, and I'm moving it here. Any help that you could offer would be greatly appreciated.

PyRoDragonRLS wrote:I'm in the process of doing a National History Day project on the TKE, and I have found some sources, (thanks to my own searching and some help from James) but if you know of any historically accurate sources available that are in ENGLISH, can you please let me know here. Note, I already have the SGZ pinned down, but I can't find Pei Songzhi's notes.

"The person who knows how to laugh at himself will never cease to be amused." --Shirley Maclaine

One book would be "Sun Tzu's Art of War" for strategy, since it can be applied to other things.
a)business (ex:Getting a raise)
b)competition (ex:incapitating an opponent.. just kiddingg)
c)war tactics

Another book for strategy is in general, any book about weichi. Weichi is a really good strategy game with black and white pieces with more combinations than chess.

Most people would know that for Chinese literature, Romance of the Three Kingdoms is great tp read.